A Typical Scenario

Let us look at the profile of a typical PowerPoint user. He or she
creates presentations from templates contained within PowerPoint or downloads
some from the many sites online. They insert pictures and create charts.
Most of them also copy and paste content from other applications into PowerPoint
slides. Some of them add music scores and sound effects - or even video clips
and Flash movies. The typical PowerPoint user also does not change any of
the default options in PowerPoint like turning off fast saves.

What is the result? Often, it is a fifteen
slide presentation that has ballooned to the ungainly size of 15
mb or more. And then you are expected to email that presentation
to someone who has a dial-up internet access - can things get worse?

I asked Michael about how PowerShrink evolved: "We
had a lot of problems with big PowerPoint presentations.The users
wanted to email the presentations, but they were too large. I knew
that there were some PowerPoint compression programs already available
but we wrote our own application."

Download and Installation

You can download a 20 use trial version of
the product from the PowerShrink website. The entire download is
just one file (PowerShrink.exe) that weighs a little over 800 kb.
Once you've downloaded the file, just double-click it to start
the application.

Using PowerShrinker

Using PowerShrinker is deceptively simple.
Just provide the program with a PowerPoint presentation on your
hard disk and choose a location to save the compressed file (or
let PowerShrink save it in the same folder as the presentation).

I chose to compress a file that weighed 1.14
mb - in the next screen I chose the Normal Compression option.

PowerShrink started the compression operation.

Sometime between the compression process,
it asked me if I wanted to flatten embedded objects - I agreed.

Finally my compressed presentation weighed
550 kb from the original 1.14 mb with no perceptible change in
quality.

In Conclusion

PowerShrink does a capable job of compressing
PowerPoint presentations - it's quick and easy to use and does
not cost too much.

Advanced users might be able to attain the
same results if they use optimized content or fine-tune their PowerPoint
environment but for everyone else, PowerShrink is a good investment.
This is especially true if you often need to email your presentations.